However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. Thanks to Tim Cooks deplomacy they also happen to be in the good grace of Trump unlike the others.
I've seen the argument made here and there, but I am not a lawyer and I don't recall well enough who I saw it from, so I don't know whether this is a good argument. But it's an argument being made by at least one company that presumably does hire lawyers, so it's probably not a terrible one.
Their record on privacy is unrelated as far as I can tell to antitrust, though; I'm not sure why you brought it up in this context.
In that case, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have “monopolies” on their platforms?
The argument is that what Apple's doing inside there 'monopoly' is egregious enough to run afoul of these laws. Whether creating a music app on their system that is by default at a 30% revenue advantage compared to their competitors runs afoul of these laws is the question.
Monopolies by themselves aren't necessarily a problem it's when they leverage their monopoly position that there are issues.
Everything that people complain about with Apple us even worse with the consoles.
1. People complain about having to buy a Mac and pay $99 a year to develop for iOS. You can’t even develop on a PlayStation without signing an NDA and I couldn’t find anywhere reputable that knew the price.
2. The console makers also get a cut of every game sold on their platform - either physical or digital.
3. The platform owners - especially Nintendo - are much stricter about what they will allow on their platforms.
4. It’s much harder to “sideload” console games.
5. All of the console makers have first party games where they don’t have to pay a fee to themselves.
Whether creating a music app on their system that is by default at a 30% revenue advantage compared to their competitors runs afoul of these laws is the question.
Spotify hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years so they don’t pay a fee.
But on the other hand, I can “sideload” my own music and integrate it with my Apple Music library without paying Apple anything. Can I do that with Spotify? It seems like Spotify has more of a walled garden than Apple...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains...
They have a monopoly on fruit named phones at the very least :-P